En route to Endeavour Crater. Credit: NASA/JPL
Just relayed imagery from NASA’s Opportunity Mars rover show it making progress on its long distance trek toward Endeavour crater.
Back here on Earth, operators of the rover have had Endeavour in their sights since the summer of 2008, when the wheeled machinery on Mars finished two years of studying Victoria Crater.
By the spring of 2010, Opportunity had covered more than a third of the charted, 19-kilometer (12-mile) route from Victoria to Endeavour and reached an area with a gradual, southward slope offering a view of Endeavour’s elevated rim.
Opportunity’s Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars is helping the rover team choose which part of Endeavour’s rim to visit first with the rover.